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South African innovator Amohetsoe Shale is drawing attention across the rehabilitation and innovation sectors with her work to develop a lower-cost prosthetic knee through her company, Navu, tackling one of the biggest barriers facing amputees in many African markets: access to functional components that people can actually afford.
Shale recently spoke at SA Innovation Week 2026, held from 16 to 20 March, where organisers positioned the event as a national innovation platform focused on implementation, commercialisation, and measurable impact.
At the centre of Shale’s work is a simple but powerful question: why should mobility be a privilege? Her motivation grew from direct clinical exposure during her training in medical orthotics and prosthetics, where she worked with amputees who travelled long distances for care but still could not access the quality prosthetic components they needed. In one case, an older amputee from the Eastern Cape returned repeatedly to clinic without meaningful improvement in walking comfort because better prosthetic options were financially out of reach. That experience helped shape Navu’s mission to create a more functional knee solution for lower-income users.
Shale’s argument is not simply that prosthetic knees are expensive, but that the quality gap between what is affordable and what is clinically desirable remains too wide. In public-sector settings, patients may receive basic devices because that is what systems can fund, while more advanced knees in the private or imported market can be priced far beyond the reach of most users. Navu’s response has been to focus on a prosthetic knee intended for low- to middle-income communities, using a combination of clinical experience, academic research, and engineering development to reduce cost while improving function.
According to the account provided in the original report, the Navu knee has been positioned as costing around $440, or roughly R25,000, and Shale has described it as dramatically cheaper than high-end imported alternatives. I have not independently verified the exact current commercial price or regulatory sales status of the device, so that figure should be understood as a reported claim from the coverage and Shale’s public remarks rather than a confirmed market-wide benchmark. Even so, the broader point is clear: there is a major unmet need for prosthetic knee solutions priced for African realities rather than for wealthier health systems.
Navu’s journey is also notable because of how early Shale began the commercialization process. She registered the company while still an undergraduate, partly to ensure that the research would not simply remain on a shelf waiting for someone else to take it forward. That path later connected to further research at Stellenbosch University, where the prosthetic knee project became part of her broader biomedical engineering work and entrepreneurial development. Stellenbosch has described her work as an effort to bridge the gap between clinical practice and innovation by developing an affordable prosthetic knee through Navu.
The road has not been straightforward. Shale has spoken about challenges around intellectual property, university ownership structures, medical device validation, access to testing infrastructure, and credibility in an immature manufacturing ecosystem. Those barriers will sound familiar to many in the O&P sector, particularly in emerging markets where innovators often face a double challenge: proving the technology itself while also building the industry structures needed to support manufacturing, testing, regulation, and adoption.
For IMEA CPOs, the significance of this story goes far beyond one founder or one device. It highlights a strategic issue facing the wider region: many markets in India, the Middle East, and Africa still depend heavily on imported component systems that were not designed around local purchasing power, reimbursement limits, or public-sector realities. That creates a persistent gap between clinical need and actual access. Shale’s work points toward a different model, one in which regional innovators develop products around local constraints, local patient needs, and local service conditions. This is an inference based on the problem her project is addressing and the wider realities of many IMEA markets.
There is also a deeper lesson here for the profession. Affordable innovation in prosthetics should not be mistaken for “cheap” innovation in the negative sense. In many cases, the real challenge is to create components that are cost-appropriate, durable, clinically meaningful, and manufacturable at scale, without simply importing assumptions from premium markets. For clinics, ministries, NGOs, and rehabilitation investors across IMEA, stories like Navu’s raise an important question: how much more progress could the sector make if more innovators were encouraged to solve regional problems with regionally relevant engineering?
As Shale’s prosthetic knee moves further toward market adoption, the long-term impact will depend not only on price, but also on validation, clinician confidence, regulatory pathways, supply consistency, and real-world patient outcomes. But even at this stage, the story is already important. It shows that prosthetic innovation in Africa does not have to be limited to distribution of imported products. It can also mean designing, building, and scaling solutions from within the continent itself.
Impact on IMEA CPOs
- Stronger case for regional manufacturing: The story reinforces the need for more prosthetic component development within emerging markets rather than total dependence on imports.
- New pricing benchmarks: It highlights the commercial opportunity for clinically useful products positioned below premium imported pricing.
- Greater relevance for public-sector care: Lower-cost functional knees could improve fit between component selection and real public-hospital budgets.
- Encouragement for clinician-led innovation: Shale’s journey shows how clinical exposure can directly inform more relevant product development.
- Pressure to localise validation and testing capacity: The difficulty of accessing prosthetic test infrastructure remains a real barrier for innovators across IMEA.
- Navu profile on Rolling Inspiration
- SA Innovation Week 2026
- Stellenbosch University profile on Amohetsoe Shale
- South African Orthotic & Prosthetic Association (SAOPA)
